Early science fiction and occultism

This dissertation examines engagements between early science fiction (SF) and the body of modern esoteric theories and practices often described as ‘occultism’. SF is often seen as an imaginative extension of secular, empiricist science — the cultural form furthest from magic and occult logic — but this research shows that science fiction shares many of the motivations and perspectives of occultism. It argues that SF developed some of its central tropes and stylistics from its nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century engagement with magical, mesmerist, Spiritualist, and Theosophical currents, particularly their attempts to legitimate the paranormal and supernatural by appealing to scientific discourse, methodology, and social authority. It also examines a reciprocal phenomenon of influence in which SF’s tropes, themes, and imagined worlds have been enfolded into occult traditions and other alternative religious movements. Finally, this dissertation assesses how SF and occultism have been conjointly deployed to defend and communicate marginal scientific theories and religious systems. This project develops a framework for analysing these intersections. It starts with case studies of three authors — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Emma Hardinge Britten, and Marie Corelli — each of whom generated SF from earnest communication and exploration of occult scientific hypotheses in fiction. Each case study illustrates areas of intersection in which occultism and SF influenced each other’s development, including a mutual affectation of scientific verisimilitude, naturalisation of the supernatural, a preference for hypothesis over fact, and projection of unknown forces and powers into the future. The final chapter expands scope to consider the network of occult and science fictional engagement from 1860 to 1926, illustrating further areas of intersection including an instinct for re-enchantment and a mediation of binaries constructed along the lines of science versus religion. Finally, it examines the esoteric heritage of several key tropes of science fiction: psionic powers, space exploration, and the extra-terrestrial

Moral geographies in Kyrgyzstan : how pastures, dams and holy sites matter in striving for a good life

This thesis is an ethnography of how places like mountain pastures (jailoos), hydro-electric dams and holy sites (mazars) matter in striving for a good life. Based on eighteen months of fieldwork in the Toktogul valley of Kyrgyzstan, this study contributes to theoretical questions in the anthropology of post-socialism, time, space, work and enjoyment. I use the term ‘moral geography’ to emphasize a spatial imaginary that is centred on ideas of ‘the good life’, both ethical and happy. This perspective captures an understanding of jailoos which connects food, health, wealth and beauty. In comparing attitudes towards a Soviet and post-Soviet dam, I reveal changes in the nature of the state, property and collective labour. People in Toktogul hold agentive places like mazars and non-personalized places like dams and jailoos apart, implying not one overarching philosophy of nature, but a world in which types of places have different gradations of object-ness and personhood. I show how people use forms of commemoration as a means of establishing connections between people, claims on land and aspirations of ‘becoming cultured’. I demonstrate how people draw on repertoires of epic or Soviet heroism and mobility in conceiving their life story and agency in shaping events. Different times and places such as ‘eternal’ jailoos and Soviet dams are often collapsed as people derive personal authority from connections to them. Analysing accounts of collectivization and privatization I argue that the Soviet period is often treated as a ‘second tradition’ used to judge the present. People also strive for ‘the good life’ through working practices that are closely linked to the Soviet experience, and yet differ from Marxist definitions of labour. The pervasively high value of work is fed from different, formally conflicting sources of moral authority such as Socialism, Islam and neo-liberal ideals of ‘entrepreneurship’. I discuss how parties, poetry and song bring together jakshylyk (goodness) as enjoyment and virtue. I show how song and poetry act as moral guides, how arman yearning is purposely enjoyed in Kyrgyz music and how it relates to nostalgia and nature imagery. The concept of ‘moral geography’ allows me to investigate how people strive for well-being, an investigation that is just as important as focusing on problem-solving and avoiding pain. It also allows an analysis of place and time that holds material interactions, moral ideals, economic and political dimensions in mind

Holland City News, Volume 14, Number 41: November 14, 1885

Newspaper published in Holland, Michigan, from 1872-1977, to serve the English-speaking people in Holland, Michigan. Purchased by local Dutch language newspaper, De Grondwet, owner in 1888.https://digitalcommons.hope.edu/hcn_1885/1045/thumbnail.jp

Parapsychology and Buddhism – to afford a comparison between descriptions of psychic experiences in Buddhist works and in parapsychological research

The presented research project is aimed at affording a comparison between the description of psychic experiences in Buddhist works and Parapsychological research. As such, this thesis scholastically outlines the Buddhist Pāli Canon’s perspective on the phenomenon of psychic power or psi. This particular Theravadin Buddhist scripture has long been available but has not been scrutinised until now to academically research the instances of psi contained within it. Moreover, no previous attempt has been made by Buddhist academics and parapsychologists to gather all such instances in a separate collection. Therefore, during the first phase of this research project, all the psi incidences from the Pāli Canon in English were collected and were then analysed qualitatively, using the content analysis method. The analysis identified 257 instances of psi and drew out several themes which linked the possibility of psi with the concept of merit, which is the central finding of this thesis. During the second phase, fifteen expert Vipassana meditators across India were interviewed, not only to get their perspectives on psi but also to compare the findings from the Pāli Canon analysis with contemporary living practitioners. The interview data analysis was carried out using the thematic analysis method; these results were consistent with the findings of the first phase of the research and formed the basis for the proposal of an experiment that can be implemented in the future to test psi in a novel way. The body of research represents a strong response to the aim of this study by critically justifying the nature of psi based on merits, in contrast with parapsychologists’ description of psi as spontaneous or as that which can be elicited with the help of psi-conductive states. Accordingly, this thesis adds valuable knowledge to the academic disciplines of parapsychology and Buddhist studies, in which the theme of merit has not previously been linked to the possibility of psi, although there was some parallel understanding from both the fields to some extent. This research suggests the possibility of providing evidence for psi with a proposal on the idea of the act of truth (pāli: saccakiriya, meaning assertion of truth speech), which can be carried out in future. The time required and the huge and complex nature of the Pāli Canon was perceived as one of the limitations. This PhD research finds its place in various psychology and theology related subject areas

The Indians of Canada: Their Manners and Customs

https://commons.und.edu/settler-literature/1144/thumbnail.jp

ARRIVING AT A COMMON GROUND: JOHN REED SWANTON AND AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGY

This project examines the life of renowned anthropologist John Reed Swanton (1873-1953 ) and his work with indigenous peoples. Combining several methodologies that included archaeology, anthropology, history, and linguistics, Swanton's research methods anticipated ethnohistory. His contributions to Native Southeast studies remain indispensable and his work in the Native Northwest, particularly with Haida and Tlingit communities, continues to serve as an important reference point for many scholars. Reared in the "Boasian" school of thought, John Swanton rejected both evolutionary and racial frameworks in which to evaluate Indian cultures. He remained an exemplary anthropologist from the beginning of his professional career at the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1900 through his retirement in 1944. A key aspect of this study concerns the dynamics of the individual dialogs that took place between Swanton and some of his Indian informants. These interactions provide a window into the ways in which anthropologists and Indians interacted. At times, anthropologists and Indian collaborators grasped the other's intentions. Just as often, however, the two parties held incompatible expectations, and as a result, misunderstand each other. For example, Swanton appreciated the storytelling creativity and individual artistry of his Haida collaborators, but often overlooked the intentions of the southeastern Indians who shared their stories with him. Many of the creation stories southeastern Indians told Swanton referenced the difficult circumstances they were currently facing or had undergone in the recent past, such as attacks on their cultures, removal, and alcoholism. Swanton often disregarded creation stories that included such material, as he felt they indicated cultural loss

The Search for an Internationalist Aesthetics: Soviet Images of China, 1920-1935.

This dissertation examines images of China produced in early Soviet culture, focusing in particular on the mid-to-late 1920s, a period of heightened Soviet involvement in Chinese politics. It argues that China became in this period the primary testing ground for the creation of an "internationalist aesthetics": a mode of representation that might express horizontal solidarity over vertical dominance, and inscribe China into the global map envisioned by Marist-Leninist theories of revolution. Seeking to produce a new China to replace the exotic Orient, Soviet artists and writers experimented with multiple genres and media--reportage, film, theatre, biography--in their search for the correct mode for internationalist aesthetics. The struggle over how to represent the world for a revolutionary society thus coalesces, in this period, around the question of how to represent China. Such an aesthetics is inevitably interconnected with politics, and internationalist aesthetics encountered and expressed the same ambiguities as the political project of Soviet internationalism: a liberatory, anti-imperial ideology that simultaneously sought to control political and historical narratives from the world revolution's proclaimed centre in Moscow. Consequently, these disparate images are united by an insistence on the privileged position and perspective of the Soviet observer, who looks at Chinese reality with a combination of advanced modern knowledge, sympathy with oppression, and revolutionary experience that is purportedly inaccessible to other Europeans, or indeed to the Chinese themselves. This privileged perspective on China undergirds the claims of internationalist aesthetics to present a true image of the world. The search for an authoritative mode for internationalist aesthetics is hampered, however, by recurrent issues of access, mediation and translatability, and by lingering parallels between this avowedly anti-imperialist discourse and the imperial systems of knowledge production it supposedly replaces

Writing the railway: biosemiotic strategies for enforming meaning and dispersing authorship in site-specific text-based artworks

This practice-led PhD is concerned with the subject matter of contemporary art. It proposes methods by which a writer-maker’s authorship can be dispersed throughout reticulated networks of interpretation, and tests the limits of detail articulable in an artwork. To counter the literary and discursive turns that have dominated art theory and practice since the 1970s, the thesis demands a reassessment of the privileging of the viewer and of the adoption of indeterminacy as a generic style. It proposes instead a turn to biosemiotics as a means to situate the artwork materially, bodily, historically. That ambiguity and pluralism can consequently be deployed strategically, affectively and to critical effect is tested and evaluated in the accompanying practice. The thesis gives an account of the theorising and devising of text-based artworks which take the UK railway as site, and considers site-specificity a particular sort of engagement with subject matter. The railway is approached as a complex technical object consisting in multiple entangled intentions and interpretations – social, emotional and political valences, diffracted by a spectrum of practices, knowledges and semiotic ontologies – all of which are available to the writermaker as immanent materials of the artwork. Part One of the thesis presents a transdisciplinary argument that draws on biosemiotics, linguistic anthropology, philosophy of time and socio-psychology as well as art history and critical theory. Part Two performs an analysis of paradigmatic descriptions of the railway, speculates on the social dynamics of a train carriage interior and empirically tests the bureaucratic structures of London Underground. Part Three is an exegesis of three pieces submitted as documentation in the practice portfolio: an audio work, a guided tour and a live performance on a train carriage tabletop